No Right to Prosecute
My name is Park Taesu.
Today, I killed a landlord.
The reason was simple enough.
The bastard was a lease scammer.
* * *
The police had been dragging their feet, muttering about how it was a civil matter and there was no evidence, but the instant the homeowner on paper was ruled a "suicide," they made a cheerful announcement as if they’d been waiting for just that.
"He’s dead! Case closed!"
No right to prosecute. You can’t press charges against the dead. And if the famously excellent police force of the Republic of Korea had deemed it suicide, anyone who dared suggest another angle was obstructing official duties.
The case would have been shut right there if the media hadn’t splashed the victims’ so-called “real suicides” across every front page.
Once the higher-ups felt public pressure, things moved fast.
The police promptly arrested and dragged in the real mastermind behind the massive lease fraud: the so-called Villa Emperor.
The Emperor was sentenced to twelve years in prison at first instance.
Our victims’ group raised a toast.
That is, until the appeal result came in.
I sat in the courtroom gallery, staring blankly as I muttered, “Suspended sentence?”
The words spread through my head like ramen broth spilled across a floor.
Suspended sentence? A suspended sentence? He’d been given twelve years, hadn’t he? Wasn’t suspended just letting him walk? How the hell did twelve years turn into a suspended sentence? Was this some kind of joke?
And there were two reasons for this “joke.”
The first was that public attention had already cooled.
The second was the former-star-lawyer the Emperor had hired.
The Emperor had claimed he didn’t even have enough money to eat and die on, yet he’d spent a fortune to bring in a lawyer who’d once been a Supreme Court justice.
At that point, the prosecutors—who no longer had anyone above them leaning on their necks—and the judges, who knew they’d need cushy former-justice law firms when they retired, were all singing the same tune.
The noise in the courtroom buzzed like a pot full of mad frogs.
And through that noise, one brutally simple truth reached my ears.
“My life’s fucked…”
I jumped.
Right.
Yeah.
My life’s fucked.
There’s nothing left to lose.
* * *
The Villa Emperor invited his guests to his private villa in some remote corner of Gyeonggi Province.
“Thank you for your brilliant judgment, Your Honor.”
The Emperor said it while pouring drinks. The judge lifted his glass with proper composure.
“I didn’t decide with any particular intent. Isn’t it a principle of modern law to favor the defendant when doubt remains?”
That was when the former-star-lawyer seized the opening and fawned over him.
“I’ve known you since you were still on the bench, Judge Kim, and you were always exemplary. Ah, the ignorant masses scream for execution or life imprisonment every time something happens, but we can’t let ourselves be swayed by that red-commie people’s tribunal nonsense.”
“Haha! That’s such a perfect line I’d want to put it straight into the ruling.”
The Emperor’s underlings—real estate agents and construction-company bosses, all essential pieces in a large-scale lease scam—joined in with their own praise.
“You can push things, but only so far. What landlord in his right mind keeps a tenant’s deposit safe and sound just to hand it back when they leave?”
“If failed investments get treated like fraud, that’s a problem. We’re the ones whose stomachs are turning inside out here.”
“Honestly, it’s because they’re uneducated. Dealing with people who have nothing is exhausting.”
After several rounds of drinks, the Emperor said casually, “Those guys will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court and try to gnaw at us again, so I hope I can count on you next time too.”
“That’s not my case, but with a ‘capable lawyer’ like him around, what’s there to worry about?”
“You flatter me.”
The former Supreme Court justice-turned-‘capable lawyer’ raised his glass with a genial smile.
Of course, being as capable as he was, he hadn’t forgotten to slip a humble envelope to the prosecutor who would need to twist the next trial with some absurd angle, all while bowing with just the right amount of deference.
While the prosecutor was making a routine show of refusing, that was the timing. The lawyer shot the Emperor a glance.
The real business was starting now.
Entertaining judges and prosecutors was simply part of the regular operating procedure of the judiciary. It was no coincidence that the largest entertainment district in Korea stood right beside the Supreme Court and the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office.
Still, judges and prosecutors didn’t usually get brought in together like this, because the turf where each side profited was different.
But there was no helping it. The Villa Emperor wasn’t quite at the level of a chaebol-grade criminal.
Since he came from scammer-trash stock, he couldn’t offer a refined reward like hiring them on as executives at a law firm, and that left only the usual kind of hospitality. Even then, the “goods” used for it were a little too exposed to keep reusing without concern.
You can’t disappoint the big shots who came here risking their necks with expectations in hand. The Villa Emperor called for his “bodyguards.”
Of course, they weren’t a licensed security company, just the sort of gang leader who’d used to rough up tenants who complained and beat them into submission.
“Are they here?”
“Yes, sir. The crackdown’s been rough lately, so I’ve got them waiting near the county town.”
“Go fetch them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Everyone was grinning. Judge Kim, who’d had rather a lot to drink, was already taking off his pants.
But what came through the door a short while later wasn’t the woman and the drugs they’d been waiting for.
* * *
Now that I’m telling it, I should mention this: I have no parents.
Living like a refugee under an orphanage director who thought charity was just state-subsidized slave trade, then having my self-reliance stipend taken away the instant I came of age because, naturally, that’s how it worked… that honestly wasn’t the hardest thing to endure.
What pissed me off most was the chain reaction of poverty and crime.
Orphans with no money and no relatives to lean on are exactly the kind of bait criminal organizations salivate over.
And once some of the older kids on that road get in deep, they start dragging in the younger ones they know, too.
For orphans who had nowhere that truly needed them, even the wad of bills waved in front of their faces was a temptation hard to refuse. And expecting them to endure society’s disdain just by “being diligent” in a system that already looked down on them was asking a bit much.
Not everyone is like that, of course. The vast majority live honest lives as ordinary citizens. I’m not a criminal either.
It just means we’re far more vulnerable to that sort of pressure than a comfortably raised “normal person” would be. And then society’s prejudice against orphans only gets stronger.
What am I getting at?
Well, one of the brokers supplying entertainment to that villa was an old classmate from my orphanage days.
* * *
Just then, on his way out to carry out the Emperor’s orders with two underlings in tow, Cha Hongsa ran straight into Taesu.
“Hey. What the hell are you?”
Taesu reached behind him.
The axe hidden beneath his hooded jacket settled into his hand.
If you swing that at a person, even the most lenient ruling will still land you with years of prison time. Given that Taesu was a poor orphan, the sentence would only be longer.
That was all.
Taesu brought the axe down on Cha Hongsa’s face. Not a single word of pretense.
“Aaaagh!”
As the thug rolled around with his face split open, Taesu swung again. His larynx snapped along with his neck bones, and the courtyard fell quiet once more.
The gangsters around Cha Hongsa screamed.
“What the hell is this bastard!”
“I-I’ll go report it!”
“You crazy bastard. Don’t run!”
But people with no real training were exactly what they looked like. They flapped about like birds trying to lift off, jerking their heads around in panic, while their feet seemed to have no idea where to go.
One guy took the axe straight in the temple with no defense at all, and the other doubled over clutching his groin after Taesu kicked him there, only to have the back of his head split open while he writhed on the ground.
Taesu couldn’t suppress the urge to whistle.
He had no idea why he’d spent so long hesitating up to now.
Once he’d given up on life, why was everything this simple?
Taesu strode right up and kicked in the front door.
The fact that there didn’t seem to be a back door suited him just fine.
* * *
The first person to recognize Taesu was the Villa Emperor, who had met him before.
“You… you!”
Taesu didn’t answer.
Instead, he brought the axe down as if splitting firewood.
The forearms of the lawyer and the prosecutor—who had been trading coy lines about leaving the lucky lottery ticket on the table and telling him to put it away, or insisting they weren’t that sort of people—were nearly severed at once.
Fortunately, they didn’t have to suffer for long. Their throats went the same way a moment later.
Once the carotid arteries were cut, jets of blood shot up to the ceiling and walls. The people there were reminded of childhood, of holding a garden hose tightly shut while playing around with the spray.
But nostalgia didn’t last long.
Taesu immediately kicked the table over. Against the backdrop of that fountain of blood, the one-in-eight-million lottery ticket and the liquor glasses spun wildly through the air.
Through it all, the heel of Taesu’s military boot came whipping out again.
And it buried itself in the face of the real-estate agent who’d said the landlord was rich, so the deposit was safe.
Tilting backward with the sofa and all, the agent’s body pitched forward from the rebound of the chair behind him, like a wrestler thrown onto the ropes and then bounced back.
Taesu, just as slick as a heel wrestler, locked in a guillotine choke. The broker couldn’t take the improvised technique and snapped his own neck.
The first to gather himself was the construction-company boss.
The habit of dragging gangsters around to threaten fraud victims hadn’t died out. He roared and hurled a liquor bottle at Taesu.
But Taesu twisted his upper body at that close range and dodged it.
For the boss, who had spent a long life beating people up in his own way, the realization hit like a flash of doom.
He’s not a rookie!
Of course, with an axe in hand, there was no need to resort to martial arts. Rather than making a neat combination out of a dodge and a counter, Taesu simply buried the axe blade in the man’s face.
He gave the axe a slight shake.
The handle didn’t seem to have come loose, and the blade didn’t seem all that damaged either.
The online hardware shop whose address he didn’t even know was, in fact, remarkably honest.
More honest than any person in this room.
Judge Kim sprang to his feet—still not properly dressed—and shouted, “Y-You bastard. Are you a gangster? T-This is at least life imprisonment! You killed someone! You think you’ll get away with this?”
After all, in this country, if you kill someone with money you’re a pillar of the economy, and if you kill someone with an axe you’re a criminal.
Taesu didn’t deny the Republic of Korea’s stern rule of law. Instead, he asked something else.
“Do you think you’ll get away with this?”
The judge was at a loss for words.
Not because Taesu’s logic was airtight. Anyone would be speechless if an axe tore their mouth apart.
Taesu shifted his gaze to the only man left standing: the Villa Emperor.
The Emperor dropped to his knees in the sea of blood at once.
“Y-You mean the deposit, right? If you spare me, I’ll transfer it right now. I can even add another zero, no—two zeroes. I won’t tell anyone about tonight, I swear…”
Taesu brought the axe down on the Emperor’s shoulder.
The Emperor rolled across the floor, shrieking. Only after calmly hacking at his ankle as well did Taesu speak.
“No.”
Not long after, every one of them—including the Villa Emperor—was processed as "no right to prosecute."
No one could punish that lease scam ring now. You could say the purpose of the gathering the Emperor had hosted was fulfilled.
* * *
After dousing myself with water in the bathroom, I poured the gasoline I’d brought all over the corpses.
When I looked around, an LPG gas cylinder caught my eye.
It didn’t really suit the place… though maybe that was because we were in the countryside, or because they didn’t want meter readers coming in. Probably both. Whatever. Good enough.
After cutting the gas line and setting everything up, I stepped outside and threw in a flame. The explosion was strong enough that glass fragments skimmed past my face.
While I waited for the bodies inside to roast evenly, I scattered the drugs I’d taken from the Emperor in obvious spots around the house.
The police can’t even begin investigating until the firefighters have put out the blaze.
And even after that, they’d have to decide first whether this was arson, a drug party, or a mass murder.
Finding the culprit and tracking him down would be even harder.
Because I’d tossed my phone to some neighborhood middle schoolers on the way out.
I’d even ditched the long cigarette I’d been smoking and watched them run chirping all the way to the phone shop, so by now they were probably having a grand old time climbing ladders or something.
A smartphone is a person’s true body. In economic, practical, and telecom terms and conditions terms, Park Taesu is as good as nonexistent here.
I wasn’t all that worried about getting lost without navigation.
I didn’t have any clear destination anyway. Feeling almost leisurely, I drove toward the sunset—toward the sea, that is—in the Villa Emperor’s car.
I didn’t need to paint myself with fake defenses like swagger, tension, gloom, or madness.
I had no desire to change even a single part of my usual self because of that worthless bastard. The kind of emotion people in the media always blab about—“losing something precious” and all that—was less intense than the time I’d accidentally stepped on a snail in the rain and killed it.
So I simply enjoyed the drive in my own plain way. I stopped at red lights, and I obediently slowed down whenever I passed a speed camera.
By the time I’d circled Ganghwado aimlessly, I even had enough attention left to glance at the signs for historic sites scattered here and there.
Not far past some place called Cheoljong Mineral Spring or whatever, I spotted a triangular reservoir.
It looked like a fishing spot, but there was no one there, maybe because it was nighttime or maybe because it was off-season.
That was where I stopped the car.
Suicide? Not a chance.
If I’d meant to do that, I should’ve just stayed behind when I burned the Emperor’s villa down. Why would I kill myself because of something I did wrong?
For the same reason, turning myself in was off the table too.
The reason I came here was the exact opposite.
I stood by the water and pulled out my axe.
If I was going to fight the police, this wouldn’t do me any good. I flung the axe forcefully into the reservoir, where it would only become evidence.
Then, the next instant, I made a futile attempt.
I tried to catch the axe with my other hand after it had already left mine.
Of course I did.
In the middle of the reservoir, where my axe was spinning through the air, a human figure had suddenly appeared.
And people generally don’t stay in one piece after getting hit by an axe. I know that now because I tried it today.
“Uh…!”
Irrespective of my idiotically useless shout, the axe flew straight.
And it struck true in the part that was probably the figure’s forehead.
…Even trying on purpose, that’d be hard. How the hell does an axe end up lodged in someone’s forehead like a cartoon? Horrifying.
But something even more horrifying happened right after that.
The figure, which had been tilted back hard, astonishingly began to rise again, slowly, as if nothing had happened. That was more shocking than the fact that it was standing on water.
Then it started walking toward me.
With the axe still stuck in its head.
The thing coming toward me was, in every possible sense, beyond common sense.
Usually, in situations like this, depending on the genre, don’t you get either a wild-bearded old man or a young woman in a white burial shroud?
But the one who grabbed my collar was a man who looked about my age.
He had a slightly sleazy face, but if not for the axe lodged in his head, he might even have been called handsome.
The bastard growled at me.
[Is this axe your axe?]
Author’s Note
1. The correct spelling of “shin-na” is “syner.” It was intentionally written that way in the story.
Hello, this is the cheerful novel writer Korax.
It’s been a long time since I last visited after finishing Corrupt Officials Hide Their Status Window.
I hope you enjoy it comfortably.
Thank you.
This work is fiction based on history, and the people, events, and places depicted here are unrelated to reality.
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